The 50th Law

[strrrng]

Unfortunately, when browsing over the Huffington Post website this morning, a certain "beta travesty" was brought to my attention: Robert Greene and 50 Cent's new collaboration, a foolish spin-off of The 48 Laws of Power, titled The 50th Law. I felt compelled to examine the article before making a judgment, but needless to say, my suspicions were pretty much affirmed. The pop manual to material success, is based on the simplistic notion, Fear Nothing, and consists of an array of anecdotes from Jackson's life supplemented by general historical examples to solidify the basic premise. But, based on shit like this:

Understand: We are living through an entrepreneurial revolution, on a global scale. The old power centers are breaking up. Individuals everywhere want more control over their destiny and have much less respect for an authority that is not based on merit but on mere power. We have all naturally come to question why someone should rule over us, why our source of information should depend on the mainstream media, and on and on. We do not accept what we accepted in the past.

it becomes pretty obvious what the goal is: mutual wankery veiled in strategical knowledge.

...We are all corner hustlers in a new economic environment and to thrive in it we must cultivate the kind of self-reliance that will help push us past all of the dangerous dependencies that threaten us along the way.

The first sentence caps off the artificial tenor of this piece.

Anyway, I'm disappointed to see Robert Greene stoop to such a level, and debase his hallmark beta philosophies with someone, who in my opinion is a mere "wannabe beta," to gain commercial clout. The 48 Laws could be a masterpiece; this just betrays where Greene's motivations lie, and highlights the fact that whatever new-age autonomy ideas put forth in this work are nothing more than a recursion of the very trends it attempts to critique.